Grinding my gears on “Identity Theft” …

Thankfully I haven’t suffered this, but I’m extremely bothered by the term “identity theft”. I suspect the terminology has been carefully crafted by weasel banks and creditors to make victims out of innocent third parties, allowing themselves to escape culpability for losses caused by their own gullibility.

Think how that might work the other way around: You have been passed some bad money. You try to deposit the counterfeit notes at your bank but they’re not obliging. The Federal Reserve has been duped, you say, not you. It is the Fed’s good name and their identity which is appropriated on counterfeit bank notes. You have no duty to authenticate the money nor do you accept any risk in losing valuable products or services traded for that fake money. You are entitled to the full benefit of the Fed’s printed promise: Legal tender for all debts private and public. Your bank must accept the deposit and tell the Fed to make good on the loss since their identity was misrepresented and they must sort out the mess they’re in. Yeah, right! Try that one on at your bank.

The Fed’s identity is stolen on counterfeit notes: Therefore they must suffer the loss and sort out the mess they’re in, right?

If somebody turns up at your bank, without your prior knowledge, and manages to convince them that they have your permission to clean out an account you have on deposit there, who and what was robbed?

2008 Resolutions and Predictions?

Okay, I’m not great with neither resolutions nor predictions. Like many, my most ambitious resolutions are seldom kept and my futuristic predictions often take too many years to come true. For resolutions I now keep them both high and low.

Low meaning I aim low by keeping them simple and achievable and usually only make one per year and also high because I don’t make myself the immediate beneficiary — I look for a higher purpose.

When we emigrated some eight years ago we gave away well over a hundred bottles of good wine that I had collected over a decade — which put a lot of smiles on the faces of family, friends and co-workers. Even mine, some of the reds were really sublime!

For example a couple of years back I resolved to properly dispose of and and/or recycle batteries. That resolution stuck and we still recycle and/or responsibly dispose of our batteries. We simply keep a large jar in the garage where we store old batteries which we then take to our local Best Buy or Home Depot once a year. They, like many large stores selling batteries, have bins for recycling and disposal.